Who is a hero these days?

I ask this because I had wondered why we know the names of few, or no, men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. No soldier, sailor, Marine or airman is on the cover of Time and Newsweek with the headline: “Hero.”

By comparison, I knew it was a matter of time before we saw that word associated with Al Gore, and here it is.

This week a group called DraftGore.com placed an open letter in the New York Times urging Gore to run. The letter, in the form of a full-page advertisement, said 136,000 people have signed its petition asking Gore to run…
“There are times for politicians and times for heroes. America and the Earth need a hero right now,’’ the letter said. “Please rise to this challenge, or you and millions of us will live forever wondering what might have been.’’

I’m sure we’ll hear more labeling Gore a hero in the coming days, as he accepts the Nobel Prize.

This question of how our society defines a hero was prompted by my walking by a newsstand and seeing the cover of the gay magazine, The Advocate, with the headline of a cover story on Grey’s Anatomy actor T.R. Knight, “How the F word launched a hero.”

T.R. Knight is a hero? I’m sure he’s a fine actor. (If I’m not mistaken, his character has managed to do the horizontal mambo with almost every female character on the show. Must be because he’s the sensitive one.)

But being called a slur makes him a hero? Coming out of the closet makes him a hero? I understand some gay actors say that coming out of the closet hurts their chances to play straight parts. But Hollywood doesn’t seem like a terribly hostile environment for gays.

Similarly, Al Gore, by taking up the cause of expanding government by leaps and bounds in order to deal with climate change, risked… what? Being seen as a hypocrite? Did he take a risk with “An Inconvenient Truth”? Did anyone really think that the critics would trash his efforts? That Hollywood wouldn’t embrace him and his cause in theory? (Giving up their GulfStream jets is another story.)

It’s hard to call any political figure a hero, since that title implies risk. Few politicians risk much of anything. Worst case scenario, they’re defeated at the ballot box and retire. One way or another, they’re going to live pretty well.

Actually, there is one political figure I’d call a hero, but it has nothing to do with his political career and everything to do with what he did before his political career:

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson has similar, and let’s face it, more eloquent thoughts in this vein: “It seems instead that one of two things is going on that explains why only a fraction of the American people follows our soldiers. Either Iraq has become a taboo subject, evoked only to cast blame ad nauseam about what went wrong or who erred in 2003-5, or we as a people have become crasser, in our leisure and influence — more glued to good-looking empty-heads than the hearts and souls of those who defend us. But, of course, a society that does not fathom who keeps them safe in order that it might stare at Oprah and fixate on Brad and Angelina, eventually will be a society not kept safe either to so stare or fixate.”